The first thing United States Army National Guard Sgt. Michelle Johnson noticed was how tiny the girl was. She lay on a gurney, dark hair around her shoulders, slender arms colored with bangles. She was 12, 13 at most, but despite her tender age she was pregnant—and she'd been in labor for three brutal days. "She was so itty-bitty," recalls Johnson, 29. "The sight of her just broke my heart."

Until that moment on Christmas Day 2008, it had been a typical day for Johnson on a U. S. Army firebase in the Paktika Province of remote southeast Afghanistan. The military police officer and Iraq war vet from Dixon, Illinois, had done her job: directing air traffic for supply helicopters. But around 9:00 that evening, a midwife from a clinic just yards outside the walls of the base had arrived with the girl and several family members, desperately seeking help. Earlier that day, they said, the girl's labor had gone horribly awry and her baby had died inside her. Now it remained lodged in her still-developing birth canal. Without medical help, the girl—at risk of hemorrhaging—would die too.

But no help was on the way. The doctor at the base, a physician assistant (PA), made a plea for a medevac helicopter to a Red Cross Hospital and was refused. However, it was out of the question for him to help the girl: Rural Afghani custom forbids women to be treated by male doctors, and if the girl's husband found out a man had provided her medical care, she could be shot or stoned to death.

Still, there was no way the PA, Capt. David Ellis, could stand by. Johnson, who heard his call for the helicopter, offered to help even though she had only basic first-aid training: "I can give an IV. I can hold her hand. Whatever you need."

They hurried to the medical aid station, grabbing Specialist Jessica Moshage, a certified nurse assistant, plus an intelligence officer named Tess (intelligence officers' last names are not disclosed) on the way. "I had no idea what I had just gotten myself into," Johnson says. "No clue at all." What she did that night, and in the days that followed, would change her life—and the lives of the women of Paktika Province, starting with that tiny girl.

"I Let Instinct Take Over"

Incredibly, Johnson and her fellow soldiers never learned the girl's name. "When she arrived, everything was moving too fast," Johnson says. What the girl needed was a cesarean section, but the base lacked the equipment to perform one. So Ellis told the soldiers that the baby would need to be removed vaginally. With the midwife's approval, he'd examined the girl and made an attempt himself, but his hands were too big to perform the necessary procedure. He also knew that every second he spent in the girl's presence put her in more danger of surviving the pregnancy—only to be murdered by her husband. So he turned to the female soldiers and explained the horrifying details: Someone would have to reach in, compress the baby's skull and deliver the small corpse. The women held out their hands to compare size. Johnson's were the smallest.

"I literally thought I was going to throw up," says Johnson. She left the room and fell to her knees, dizzy. Only when she forced herself to focus on her mission—save that girl's life!—did her military training kick in. "I walked back in," she says, "and let instinct take over."

Tess stood next to the girl to comfort her. Moshage prepared to hand Johnson supplies, such as they were: pliers from the maintenance building, salad tongs from the mess hall to use as forceps. Through an interpreter, they asked the girl to squat, leaning on Johnson, so gravity could help ease the baby down. Ellis stood nearby, out of view, and told Johnson, step-by-step, how to perform the procedure.

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"I'd rather not have to relive what I had to do to get this baby out of a 13-year-old girl," says Johnson. "It was so awful. I was so scared. I didn't want to see what was going to come out." What kept her going? Reminding herself that the baby was already dead—and focusing on saving the life of the girl, who, remarkably, didn't make a sound. Instead, she just grabbed onto Johnson in kind of a hug, her head on the soldier's T-shirt-clad shoulder. "Keep comforting her. Tell her she's doing OK," Johnson told their interpreter. No anesthetic was available, but Johnson sensed in the girl something far stronger. "At one point she put her forehead on my forehead and we looked deeply into each other's eyes," Johnson says. "I didn't see fear. I saw strength. She wasn't crying. She was rock-solid. I had this overwhelming feeling that I didn't care what we had to do; I was not going to give up on her."

After more than two hours, the baby finally came out. Daring herself to look, Johnson was surprised to see that, from the front, the infant appeared intact. Moshage wrapped the baby in a white blanket. And after the placenta was delivered 30 minutes later, the girl looked up with exhausted eyes, managed a faint smile and murmured, "Manana." Thank you.

While the young patient collapsed into sleep, Johnson, churning with adrenaline, called home and breathlessly told the whole story to her sister, Danielle, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and again to her mother in Illinois. "It was the best and most horrifying night of my life," she says.

The next morning Johnson faced a new challenge: Get the girl out without being spotted. "We had heard reports of women in the area who had been stoned after a U.S. soldier had touched her or looked at her wrong, so we were really concerned," Johnson says. The team disguised the girl in blankets, which happened to be white, and took her out through a side gate. "Is she dead?" a patient asked through an interpreter. (In local culture, only corpses are wrapped in white.) "No," came a small voice from under the blanket. "I'm not dead." It was going to be OK.

Johnson never saw the girl again. "I wish I'd known it was going to be final," says Johnson. "I still don't know the name of the person who changed my life."

"Compassion Goes Across All Lines"

Rising to the occasion under stressful circumstances was nothing new for Johnson. Though shy as a young girl, she'd grown into a strong-willed woman, joining the Illinois National Guard even though her father didn't think women belonged in the military. "I was like, Oh, really? Watch this,'*" Johnson says. Once she'd successfully completed basic training, she says, "he was super proud. And he's been supportive ever since."

Starting in 2003, she served 18 months in Iraq and then came home to earn a master's in diplomacy. But she had regrets about her time in Iraq. "I didn't interact with the locals in the way I wanted to," she says. "I wanted to make an impact on their lives to show that Americans aren't the way we're often portrayed."

Perhaps that's why, a few days after she saved the girl's life, Johnson decided to tour the local women's clinic in Waza Khwa. She was astonished by what she saw: a single metal bed in one grubby room, heated only by a wood stove. (It was so cold inside that when babies were born, steam rose off their skin.) There were next to no supplies: no hand sanitizer, no antibiotics, not even children's pain reliever, which could save a life just by breaking a fever. Shockingly, this clinic was typical of the province and the country as a whole. Years of war plus the rise of the Taliban had destroyed the nation's health system in general and women's access to care in particular. Local customs hold that men cannot treat women; but with a female illiteracy rate of at least 80 percent—one of the highest in the world—the number of women with any medical training is infinitesimally small. Afghanistan's maternal mortality rate is so high that a woman there dies due to complications from pregnancy or childbirth every 30 minutes, according to USAID.

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Johnson and her colleagues—encouraged by Ellis—started visiting the clinic regularly, first to observe and learn from the midwives there, and then, little by little, to assist where they could. But there was only so much they could do without better supplies. Johnson created a blog about the clinic and e-mailed Danielle, who started soliciting donations from friends and medical companies in the United States. Working together thousands of miles apart, the Johnson sisters secured basic medical items and newborn clothing, as well as heaters, another bed and a simple fetal heart rate monitor. "I'll never forget seeing a woman hear her baby's heartbeat for the first time," Johnson says. As word spread of the improved care, women from all over the province began traveling hours, lining up to be treated for everything from vaginal infections to burns.

The results were astonishing. Before the soldiers and supplies arrived, Ellis estimates only about three in every 10 babies survived. But of the 30 deliveries that Johnson participated in over the course of 10 months, only two babies and one mother were lost. The soldiers' presence at the clinic also helped bridge cultural and political divides. "Other soldiers joked at first that we'd just delivered another Taliban baby. But these women had a very rough life, and I never looked at them as anything but just women. A lot of them started saying how they hated the Taliban and how they loved us. They'd say, Oh, we thought Americans were horrible, but now we see the work that you've done,'" says Johnson.

Capt. Ellis underscores the importance of that transformation. "Johnson and the others showed the locals that women are able to do amazing, important things," he says. "In that way, they went out and really stuck it to the Taliban." (For that reason, Ellis believed Johnson's activities made her a Taliban target. He was so worried for her safety that he gave three sheep to a local Afghani military officer to keep an extra eye on her when she visited the clinic.)

The triumph and tragedy the soldiers and midwives shared also created a lasting bond among the women of the Waza Khwa clinic, local and foreign. "We didn't need to speak the same language," says Johnson. "Compassion goes across all lines."

"They Need More"

Within a month of returning to the States, Johnson was back at her job as an information security officer for a large Chicago bank. But she couldn't forget the women of Paktika Province. "I love my job, but at the same time I hate sitting at my desk," she says, aching for the kind of hands-on, life-or-death difference she was able to make in Waza Khwa. So she's dedicated herself to the next best thing: founding the Afghanistan Midwifery Project. Johnson, her sister and their friend Jennifer Andrews are working to donate vital supplies to area clinics and hope to help provide local women with medical training so that more women will give birth in safer conditions. "We've sent a portable sonogram, forceps and countless amounts of medicines," Johnson says. "But they need more." Johnson, who was preparing to go back to the Waza Khwa clinic as this story went to press, will make sure they get it—if only to honor the brave young girl who had no choice but to trust Johnson with her life. "When she gave me that hug and looked into my eyes, I never imagined that we'd get to this point," she says. "Now we're on our way to making a real difference."

Lynn Harris is a frequent contributor to Glamour* and salon.com.*

How You Can Help Keep a Baby Healthy

Johnson is "accomplishing a lot *with very little resources," says Peter Saleh, M.D., a senior adviser to the *Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Help her do more: $10 buys two hygiene kits, including soap and bandages; $50 provides medical supplies for two clinics. Go to afghanmidwiferyproject.org.